I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

— Marshall McLuhan

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

— Marshall McLuhan

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.

— Marshall McLuhan

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

— Marshall McLuhan

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simpliciter of brutal directness.

— Marshall McLuhan

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

— Marshall McLuhan

Money is a poor man's credit card.

— Marshall McLuhan

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

— Marshall McLuhan

Money is the poor people's credit card.

— Marshall McLuhan

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

— Marshall McLuhan